Group Collaboration and Evaluation

Group collaboration offers many notable benefits. In the case of collaborating musicians, each member most likely plays a different instrument and have a unique background. This way, they can contribute something unique to the group in composing a piece. In working together, ideas can run wild and they can feed off each other's opinions. 

When students work together, the effects can last a whole career and even a life time. 

As dental students, this can not be truer. Not many people would understand what we are going through. Our peers understand the best because they are going through the same challenges. It is each student's job to contribute as much as they can to the group and to see that a weakness in one member is a weakness in us all. We all come with different majors and experiences. One student worked in a funeral home, another as a pharmacist and is coming back to school after 5 years in the field. We have bio majors, biochemistry majors, even singer managers. We each have something to offer. Together we can accomplish much much more.

Evaluation, both of the self and of other members of the group is crucial in professional development. In evaluating yourself, there may be something that was on the back of your mind that you didn't realize was a problem until you started thinking about it. You being to see activities as opportunities to grow and in self reflecting, you can make the adjustments, and set the goals to make this possible. Evaluating others can help you learn something about yourself. If you find that a person could do something in a particular way that is an improvement over their current state, then you could realize that you may have this problem too. So in giving feedback to others, you subconsciously apply this feedback to yourself. 

In the professional setting, collaboration can improve patient compliance and outcomes in treating a disease. One professional may have read a journal article that another has not so he may be able to bring something to the table. We could have a general practitioner collaborating with a dentist, pharmacist, and nurse practitioner, each offering a different point of view of the disease so they can all create a single treatment plan that considers all aspects of the disease. One dentist could offer another dentist advice on how they perform a certain procedure or how they communicate with their patients. It is up to the second dentist to evaluate the advice given and implement changes to his practice if appropriate.

Overall, dentistry is about collaboration and to be effective collaborators we must be able to give feedback and to receive feedback efficiently and regularly.

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Jason Tu

Academic Success and Boat Cruise

I find it reassuring that the school states out front that it will do everything in its power to help us succeed. Not just succeed but to become the best dentist that we can be. In order to do so we will be getting a thorough education (or rather, re-education) on the basic sciences, and will be getting lots of practice in the hand-skills and technical components. This means that we will have more time to worry about patient interaction, arguably the most difficult aspect of practice.

Dentistry is "arts and crafts at its best" apparently. You have students who never practice and can produce fantastic soap carvings, but you also have the majority who need to output sweat and blood to produce something passable.

Basically the above information and the workshop on public safety was the most useful to me. I might as well have fallen asleep for the rest of the "content". I guess they could have video recorded everything they wanted to say to us but they wanted attendance. But attendance was only 50%. Where did everyone go?

During lunch, I had the privilege of dining at a Persian place with Tuan, a student with some of the most impressive credentials I have ever seen.

The boat cruise had some magnificent views and I was able to talk to many people but because of the overcrowdedness and not to mention loudness, I don't remember most of those I spoke to. Although many D1's went to a bar/club in the meat-packing district, I just went home, in preparation for a new day.

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Jason Tu

Professional School

Today was the first day of orientation at NYUCD. Dr. John Sexton and Dr. Bertolami talked about professional school. Professional school is different from undergrad. It just is. It is not solely about the self or achieving one's goals but rather it is about changing one self so that one is able to serve others in a respectable profession. It is about standing for something larger than yourself and making your life meaningful. To do so, like before-mentioned, incoming students undergo a metamorphosis; they change. They morph into leaders in their community who make a dent in other people's lives. 

I can never forget how a simple procedure can change a patient's self confidence. Imagine if you tripped, fell, and chipped a tooth. Your self confidence would drop since our society connects status with the condition of your teeth. You don't smile with your teeth exposed, you avoid opening your mouth for others to see. But, however, when you get a veneer to fix the chipped tooth, you have renewed confidence. You can smile again without worry of judgement from others.That is the kind of impact a dentist can make. It takes minutes, but the effects inundate the fabric of time.

We can absorb all the information, learn all the facts by heart, then practice what we've learned on a mannequin, but even still we could be missing something:  the human aspect. We must not lose sight of how we are dealing with human beings who feel pain, and suffering, and have fears and concerns. Part of the excitement of being in professional school is that we, in a few years, are going to be depended upon for sound advice and technical excellence while treating the patient as a whole. And by whole I don't just mean in the biological sense, but also in the psychological, the subconscious. Dr. Bertolami says that a patient can go to a dentist and have their teeth fixed perfectly as if my automaton but even still, something would be missing. Something indescribable that only the patient can put a finger on.